


Lifetime Achievement Award

by Vaseurne



Category: SCP Foundation
Genre: (Almost), Canon-Typical Violence, Horror Adventure, M/M, Original Characters - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:09:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23231485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vaseurne/pseuds/Vaseurne
Summary: If you catch a tiger by the tail,Don't fail.A story involving loss, chasing UFOs in Arizona and hunting Reality Benders if you are Dr. Alto Clef and protege on the trail of the greatest, most dangerous Type Green that's ever been.
Relationships: Agent & Alto Clef, Agent/Simon Glass, Alto Clef/Benjamin Kondraki
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	1. Gunman

_In a known present…_

“So, about when would you say in your opinion that you flew completely off the fucking rails, Agent?”

The cell where the question’s asked, as though it couldn’t have been anything else, was sparse. Shock white walls, featureless (although he knew behind the bolt panels there’d be sound proofing; behind those on some side—probably the one in front—the one-way glass where the Agent sincerely hoped someone who thought themselves important was wasting their lunch watching this) gray linoleum floors, the usual suspects should you be trying to recreate a sanitarium straight of the 60s. But wasn’t that just it with the Global Occult Coalition?

“I’ve already told you,” the Agent replied, voice betraying sunny disposition not misplaced on a rusty nail. “I killed it. What more is there to say?”

All the best fancy suit tech and skip-brain blasting guns but the most important clock of all stopped turning sometime in the Cold War.

_Tch._

A metal box suitably brutalist on the Agent’s right flank—about the only toy in the room he didn’t have some familiarity with—squealed like a boiling pot, ticking something out from an LED panel at an angle only his interrogator could see. Bunch of bullshit and more smoke in mirrors, if you asked him. If they meant to scare him, they’d have to do better than this.

“What’s it feeding you?”

“That’s not for you to know, Agent.”

 _Hnh._ Here he doubted that. But when in titanium restraints, well.

“I have a better idea. Why don’t we start at the beginning? You formally deserted Strike Team Ragnarök four weeks ago on a Monday. Color me curious, so I’ll have you recount the day for me. What specifically possessed you to board that plane, Agent?”

Do as Romans do.

“It was another cold morning in Moscow,” the Agent began.

And it started like this:

Going to the mailbox was something you had to learn to enjoy. Of course, you’d have to be stupid to use the official box the Coalition left out for you besides letters from Mom—therefore, always empty—so the mailbox this Agent knew was a babushka whose English was worse than his Russian. He had a system with her, though. One box of the best tea from wherever she wanted that month and she’d shove a parcel into his arm and encourage him to speak to God (least, that was what he was mostly sure she meant) if he begged to ask for more.

Well, he wasn’t begging for more that Monday.

As he left and unfurled the package to reveal a return sender from nowhere Germany, the Agent all but burst into greater Moscow to find a park where he could sit and peel the damn thing open, cutting it through with a knife produced from who-knows-where and to who-knows-where it was returned.

A letter:

_Max,_

_Sorry that you couldn’t come. I’m told you skipped out on the whores in Toulouse too. Don’t worry about me, okay? Berlin’s the last big one, I promise. Is breá liom tú._

_All the best,_

_Si_

The next envelope down the stack was a faxed copy of a death certificate.

And all he had to say:

“I learned something that I shouldn’t.”

His interrogator moved from the brutalist box—it had finished squeaking—and instead took round the center of their faceless featureless room, giving the Agent opportunity to place his familiarity. Tunguska Siberia where he was a recruit having just learned to shoot a sniper rifle let alone aiming to make sure it made point with skip skull. Now here he was, interrogator when all he had done was lone wolf the skip that nobody else in this godforsaken Coalition wanted to touch.

He knew then why he scowled.

“Yes,” his interrogator said, “I’ve seen it in your file. Charming how you, I suppose, tried to keep it on the down low. Who was it again? Oh yes, the Foundation agent—Denouement, if I’m not mistaken. Well Agent, I’m certain you learned something valuable about trusting Foundation to not keel over and die when it hurts most.”

The Agent kept on staring forward.

“But in any case, if your motivation for this project of yours was to go out in a vengeful blaze of glory, why find it within you to come back alive? You and I both know all about the golden rule, Agent. The Coalition dies where we let our people betray their teams. Even if you’ve done what you told us you have…”

The voice faded; our Agent was no longer there to hear it. The cold day in Moscow melted into a fresh spring afternoon in wooded, forested Appalachia, an entire sea beyond.

He was carrying the Polaroids.

“What’s it with you and the pictures? I know I’m not supposed to ask.”

“Someone ought to,” he said, insistent. “Someone out to take pictures. He likes it, doesn’t He?”

“I think it’s presumptuous to say He likes anything if He has not said so. But you’re probably right. Do you like the camera?”

“I’m just going to go back into my room.”

“Suit yourself. Don’t forget about supper. He says it will have lamb!”

Neither of them cared about the lamb.

The door shut behind him and he was alone. He took the first Polaroid off the stack that he carried everywhere, being sure to tell anyone that it was because He wanted him to that he did. He was sure that He liked his pictures. Wanted something permanent to attest to this wonderful place He had created here in Appalachia, kept them all happy and safe. The kind of happy and safe that made his fingers tremble as he skirted them along the gloss.

The Polaroid:

Two people in frame. One with hazel eyes and auburn hair. The other in orange hair with one eye blue and another brown. There were lights strewn in incredible places—it had to be nighttime in a beautiful city, maybe Paris, although he didn’t know where Paris was or why it came to mind. They were holding hands on a balcony that hung over those lights and those people and that **HATE** and that **MISFORTUNE** and everything that had happened to **THEM**. Above it. This picture. Probably taken through help of a timer, lightly crinkled and spotty in parts as if wet.

Always this picture.

The Polaroid after:

Another two people. This time the angle was Dutch. Here a man with hazel eyes and auburn hair smiled this sort of breezy, thoughtless smile of someone who doubted nothing as he knelt and the other was in a white beard and face turned just away from the camera and that was Him that was Him this was their place their treatise their testament to Him here in wooded, forested Appalachia while they got ready to show the world everything.

That was when he turned it over and slipped out the piece of paper folded inside. He’d already read these words.

Scribble it with red pen:

**KILL HIM**

_…took down a Tier 4 Type Green…_

And he knew.

_…in a way I would have never thought of…_

He knew everything.

_…smart as hell._

No more shaking. No more lying. He went outside and found Him in the garden, ripe and full of mystery and dreams and broken things and stolen ones.

He smiled at Him and He nodded his head in silent greeting, seated on a bench of twisted wood. He indicated an open spot and he sat, still carrying the stack of Polaroids.

“You’re asking how I did it?”

“How else are you going to take a fucking Type 4 off guard, Agent? By yourself?”

“Really… because I just leaned over and snapped His neck.”

Because they went to Berlin and got themselves killed.

But the Agent needed to say nothing for his interrogator to guess for the why. They were back in the room and the brutalist box squeaked again, weak and tinny now, summoning his interrogator back to the read out for which he made a face that indicated to the Agent that all that was on his mind right now was how desperately he needed a fucking cigar. That made the Agent smile.

Because they went to Berlin and got themselves killed.

“You can always call it early,” the Agent suggested. His interrogator scoffed.

“And then what? Do you honestly believe we’re going to set you loose? Let you off with a promotion? The end doesn’t matter in the face of the rules, Agent. If we had everyone have at it—”

“—you’d lose what little authority you were under the illusion of having?”

_**TCH!** _

“Well, whatever,” the Agent went on. “I’d bet my freckled arse that you’re going to lean into your ear right about a minute or two from now, and it’ll be the Director’s favorite lackey on the other line, and then you’ll storm out of here and leave me alone to my thoughts.” Which, his expression therein implied, would be a whole sight better than being tied to this horse and pony show. “Or you can just leave before it comes to that, what do you say?”

He wouldn’t hear anything from his interrogator again.

“Jesus,” the Agent said to a now empty room. The brutalist box had been wheeled out with his interrogator, and as divined he was alone. Still in restraints, of course, because it wouldn’t be the Coalition way to let a good deed go unpunished, but alone. He relaxed for as much as you could when strapped into something that was only one spinny bit or two removed from electric chair.

Because they went to Berlin and got themselves **KILLED**.

Had they ever been real?

This Agent was made of loss loss loss and did the impossible through it, shipped himself off to Appalachia because he wanted to die, really, and it was by none other than pure cosmic coincidence that he didn’t, that the skip just died like he said and that was that. Truthfully he didn’t know why he wandered his way back into the Coalition. It was obvious from the start that this would be what happened once they learned what he did. Perhaps just to say it could happen to you while he rotted in a cell that looked rather like this one.

Which is why it was strange that through a soundproofed room he began to hear commotion in the hall.

 _The hell?_ It was distant, sure, but audible. Shouting. Even Coalition guns being drawn, the distinct whirr of the laser kit bouncing through the Agent’s eardrums. So why wasn’t the alarm being run? Was this some kind of test?

And before he had anymore time to think, the restraints fell away and he jumped to his feet.

The door popped open and in strode a man with brimmed hat, straggles of blonde hair, but most importantly Hawaiian shirt and and sandals, the latter of which stained bloody.

Alto Clef grinned.

“Well,” he said, “For the badass reality bender slaying motherfucker I was promised.”

He indicated [Agent Kroger](http://www.scp-wiki.net/the-best-and-the-wisest) with the tip of his shotgun.

“You’re, I’d say, a foot or so off.”

Then he laughed.

“How’s about a road trip to Arizona, kid?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew. Future chapters will introduce more context, of course. I'd also like to thank my best friend Bargests for our shared SCP canon, so expect to see some crossover between their works and mine.


	2. Smooth Sailing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Getting into the horror imagery now, so those not comfortable with depictions of surreal horror and implied gore, well, here's the warning.

For some, revenge was a matter of the end of a boot knife. For one Agent Kroger, it was spreading the contents of his written file from the Global Occult Coalition out the car window and sent spiraling into the liminal zone known only as the entire state of Arizona.

Nirvana’s _Come As You Are_ blasted from the banana yellow Corvette’s speakers in tinny symphony and Alto punched the gas.

“Don’t you think a car like this is conspicuous?”

“What? Old man ears, kid. Speak up.”

“DON’T YOU THINK A CAR LIKE THIS IS CONSPICUOUS?!”

_**HA!** _

“Conspicuous for impeccable taste, maybe. Wipe the look off your face, it’s true. Besides,” Alto said, gesturing by the hand to the endless sand and nothing beyond the pockmarked highway they were blazing down, “Any critics out there you’d like to point out to me?”

Kroger sighed and returned to cleaning the barrel of his gun.

Naturally, nobody had to like Alto Clef—which, per him, nobody should have—to recognize that for whatever joke the world was playing on him, it was this batshit crazy bastard and none else that happened to be knight and all that in a Hawaiian shirt to bust him from the holding cell back at the Coalition. Even if he did liken it to “borrowing” him for his time. Just how did someone like the stories cast about Agent Ukulele become this?

 _Stay in the saddle long enough, Kroger,_ the sarcastic point of his mind mocked, and _you might just find out._

 _Hmph._ God forbid.

“Almost there, kid. You can stop your scowling.”

Least he wasn’t here being the batshit crazy bastard’s maid. (Though in the cosmic scheme of things, that hadn’t have to have counted for much.)

A couple days before:

“Did you just break into a Coalition detention center?”

“Don’t sound so amazed. They let me in, kid. I just didn’t say for what.” Alto extended him a fresh pistol from the trunk with which Kroger took and holstered without a conscious thought. “You got the goods on the way out?”

He pointed at the brutalist box behind him.

“Ain’t that all and a stack of cash. Looks like they didn’t get to sap you of usefulness yet. You’re a good one, kid. Don’t get to see that much anymore—anyway, onto the topic of your roaring rampage of revenge. Cute idea, that whole bit with the Polaroids. Wouldn’t have thought of it myself, but.”

 _So it was him behind the one way glass._ Here Kroger had been up until then fantasizing that it was someone important. Just his brand of luck then.

“You remember everything that Type Green took from you?”

A particular thought about Berlin extinguished before it could finish, Kroger simply crossed his arms. “Everything.”

Alto Clef smiled again, then ear to ear. It would have scared anybody who wasn’t this Agent in attendance.

“Suppose it’s coming up Milhouse the both of us, then. Come on, get in the passenger seat before the dogs catch up.”

Now:

“They won’t know we’re in Arizona?” The radio shut off and Kroger was out from his end of the car.

“Who? The Coalition? Not a chance. If anything they’re currently busy petitioning the Foundation as they are always. He said, she said, that whole bureaucracy one two. By the time they get anything out of each other we’ll be long gone and tapping tequilas in the Keys.” Alto swung around back, popping the truck. Kroger momentarily had the will to ask how the brimmed hat of his didn’t fly off as they were cruising it with the tarp down but got the better of it. “You do drink, right?”

“Not sure if I’d be drinking with you.”

 _Heh._ “Nice rimshot, kid.” He slid the brutalist box out and stood it on its wheeling tripod, Kroger in the light catching that the back was actually made of solar panel attachments. What fortune.

“What’s that for, anyway? First time I ever saw anything like that was in the interrogation cell they stuck me in, and I consider myself up to date with the Coalition’s neverending line of new toys.”

Alto ignored him in stepping it out to the wider spit of cliffside desert they had parted the highway for, twisting some knob to pop out a wand antenna, bracing it in the air. Altogether he looked experience with it, whatever it was, which was one slice reassuring and one slice concerning for our Kroger. The last place he wanted to die was somewhere like here to a cackling old blonde in a hat and three eyes.

“To answer your question with a question,” Alto acknowledged finally as he nudged the whole thing on, “Do you believe in aliens, Agent Kroger?”

_What?_

“More specifically,” Alto continued, the brutalist beast waking up and beginning its horrible squealing, “Do you believe that there are aliens in Arizona?”

_Why is that sound so LOUD?_

“I—” Kroger could hardly think over the mechanical screams. “Jesus Christ, turn that off!”

“Well,” Alto said, amused, beaming at him his one of a million Cheshire grins, “The correct answer is, and always has been, that there are no aliens in Arizona. And I’ve just proved it.”

The box snapped dead and with it the screaming stopped. Kroger stood and, staring, felt a confusion and uncertainty wash over him that was impossible to forget was the point. Alto must have been leading him to reach some conclusion and for his sins, he wasn’t about to give him that kind of satisfaction. So Kroger rolled his knuckles and walked up closer to the dryness of pure, unadulterated, unaltered Arizona spit.

“Box was measuring counter-reality.”

Alto Clef pointed in gotcha.

“There you are!” He appeared at once genuinely impressed (for as genuine Alto Clef was with anything). “I told you that you were a good one, kid. And if it’s squealing like a goddamn pig set upon by the butcher, you and I both know what that must mean. This isn’t Tier 3. This isn’t Tier 4. Not the guy of which you so sweetly leaned over and snapped his neck. This is the real fucking deal. The big one, kid. You feel me?”

It was a while before Kroger answered.

“I’ll help you,” he said, sweeping back to face Alto. What more could there be for him to lose? He had already thrown himself at the wall trying to get himself killed in Appalachia. The least there was to do was take down this motherfucker as the biggest bloody fish in this bloody pond. “But what about that line with the aliens? Just what are you on about, old man?”

This time the radio blast of choice was Queen of the Stone Age’s _No One Knows_.

“Didn’t you have Agent Adams?”

Alto’s laughter was long and hoarse.

“Ah, Agent Adams… she outgrew me a long time ago, kid. And anyway, I would never go so low as to have called her my protege. Put on a change of clothes and that’s how fast I burn through support staff. Don’t think I’ve had anyone like her in, shit, ten years? The sniveling yes men they give me now are just tiresome. I’m an ancient bitch. I don’t need someone to shine my shoes and suggest a haircut.”

Wouldn’t take a genius to see why, but Kroger left that unsaid. He had dealt with it enough in the Coalition with his handlers. All bastards older than dirt whose only real fear was that they’d get called by the Director someday to retire and thus had it out for the recruits, ambling on about the future of the Coalition this and the future of the Coalition that. Strike Team Ragnarök themselves were infamous for going through new handlers every other month.

Maybe he’ll send them a postcard.

Here the pit stop came into view and apparently what Alto had been alluding to was a dilapidated diner straight out of a 70s oil painting as the little Corvette pulled in and got its tank of gas from a neighboring station Kroger was in earnest shock still functioned through chunks taken out of it by the wind and rust.

“You go inside and order whatever you want,” Alto said to him. “Gotta pay for this and drop the kids off.” Before there was an edge to get in, he was already gone.

Kroger scratched the side of his forehead. Suppose that’s one way to say you have to take a shit.

Inside a bell attache to the door rung and Kroger noticed instantly that, beside staff that peered at him to the cue of the ringing, the diner was completely, utterly empty. Great. Sand had long battered the windows facing, rendering them with a yellowish cast that was still at least mostly see through. He took their continued silence as indication to have his pick of the litter, sliding into a booth halfway past the door on the left side of the seated bar. They never stopped staring at him.

On an unrelated note, he was also suddenly aware he hadn’t been able to shower since the “complimentary” one they had given him at the Coalition.

_Jesus._

Threading a hand through auburn hair Agent Kroger filed that thought away to demand Alto bring them to a motel or something before the end of the day since he seemingly had a way with navigating a desolate wasteland whenever he came back. A waitress wordlessly offered coffee and, thinking something to the tune of fuck it, let her have it down in front of him.

“Just something with sausage,” he said. “I don’t care about the specifics.”

Nevermind that fingers were already grasping for his gun.

 _Off with that,_ he reminded himself, letting it all disappear under the folds of his jacket. (He did have a jacket, and a shirt, and pants, given to him by Alto to get him out of his freak suit gifted by the Coalition. With requisite shoes as an added bonus.) _Everyone acts a little strange when they’re from nowhere Arizona._

Even if just thinking that felt like tempting fate.

_Where is that blonde geezer, anyway?_

He looked out the window sipping at the coffee, whereupon a truck had somehow managed to pull into the gas station on the opposing side of the old yellow Corvette without making so much as a pin drop for noise. The driver climbed out and came into sandy view, face inscrutable for either the distance or the battered glass. He didn’t head inside but rather ahead, maybe around wherever Alto had stalked off.

Then something happened that made him almost choke.

A force knocked the driver to the ground, himself struggling but unable to get up. This went on for a moment before something caked in green and grey strode from the sand dunes into existence, long and impossibly slender. It approached the man. Watched him as he struggled ever more frantically. It had four limbs. Kroger sat entirely still. There wasn’t any way to make any detail from it before it had reached the driver, sliding in a single fluid motion as you would stake a fish straight through his torso.

When it was done the man was lying there and there was no blood.

The door rung again.

“I guess that took me long enough,” Alto said, taking into the both opposite to Kroger who wasn’t taking his eyes off the man in the window. “What did you order? Let me guess—something with sausage? Make it two, then. God, I could eat a fucking horse.”

The man began to shudder. He got up.

“What was I saying back there? Oh, right. That I told you there aren’t, nor ever, any aliens in Arizona.”

His head faced Kroger.

“And I know you’ll ask me to explain, so hold onto any witty quips for just a second.”

Then got back into his truck and drove off silent as the night though nothing had happened at all.

“Let’s eat first before we blow the heads off everyone in this diner, alright?”

As if preempting point, a platter of sausage, inedible looking eggs and pancakes were slid between them by an arm Kroger did not see. Toss the rest of forks and knives at them and well, if this wasn’t breakfast.

He didn’t have anything to say until he had eaten the meat. Alto caught him first.

“Big fish wants us to believe whatever’s happening here doesn’t have anything to do with it,” he said, oddly forthcoming now that they had eaten, and the ‘staff’ uncaring for what they were discussing. “That’s plenty fucking smart. Especially coming from a Type Green. So it’s got the whole area cloaked like acting an Area 51 play, kid. So will you believe it?”

“I just watched a man be impaled by a monster and get back up, Alto. What would you like me to think?”

Alto Clef, for his part, shrugged.

“All I’m saying is that we heard how loud that box of ours squealed. Once we’re done here I’m bringing us to an old friend of mine. Promise there’s a shower to have there and everything.”

 _I didn’t… forget it._ Probably picked up on that from the way he groped his hair in one hand and the pistol in the other. The air, Kroger then thought to feel, was waiting and gaping.

“I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t you have bought the Foundation here if it’s this bad already?”

“Foundation’s as useful as cat shit in a situation like the one we’ve got. Plus, they don’t have a single goddamn thing I need. You and I? We do.” There was the sense that Alto wasn’t going to elaborate on the point and, being given a moment to sigh like a deflated balloon, Kroger righted himself in the booth and pointed at the ever-staring ‘staff’ with his elbow.

“When do we go?”

Alto chuffed.

“Kid, try now.”

And there Hell opened its jaws wide.

Back in the diminutive seats of a yellow Corvette:

“I need a better gun.”

“There’s a sniper in the back I haven’t show you yet. Not like that would have been any better than what you had back there.”

“What were those things?”

“People,” Alto said bluntly. “People that the big fish twisted to act their parts in this play. And before you moralize me, there wasn’t any coming back from what it had done to them anyway. The more pressing issue is wondering how many people are still people left around here. Here’s hoping my guy isn’t about to jump us with a set of double jaws and needle limbs, huh?”

Agent Kroger found it hard to be comforted by that.

“Anyhow,” Alto continued, “Seems we’re here. Guess he moved business up by a couple miles.” They pulled aside from the highway and into a plateau of gravel. Kroger steeled himself and…

…it was a scrapheap beside a Winnebago and a bucket of water for a shower.

“Fuck,” a massively displeased voice called. “It’s you.”


End file.
